A daily chronicle of results of one retail futures trader trading my own accounts. I define myself as a day trader and generally swing for at least a few points most of the time. But I do make the occasional scalp for ticks too.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Tues. 2/19

2:05pm CST - 30 cent move up in pit session ($1500/contract) in ZS today thanks to Argentina drought reports and news they are delaying export sales because of expectations the peso will further depreciate against the dollar. The world is all interconnected isn't it?

6 comments:

Another financial scholar who probably has not had much experience with live day-trading or blew his account out and has conceded that day trading your own account profitably is not possible. Most will teach and pass on their advice while a few will actually do-it.

I clicked on the author info link to see that he once had an investment banker from with an investment advisory business. So I guess he feels we ought to let the "pros" make the tough decisions about investing/trading. =) Curious as to why he's no longer in that biz...

He has an MBA in Finance/Accounting and subscribes market is entirely random theory in the short term which he includes in his attack on daytraders. The thing is, he must not be very good at math and logic. The whole is the sum of it's parts, so you can't have "non-random" long term investing is it's composed of just "random" short term sub samples. Conversely, if long term investing is non random, that quality has to also show up in the shorter time frames as well.

He's currently a business professor in China, lending beautifully to the old adage that those who can, do, while those who can't, teach. =)

>if long term investing is non random, that quality has to also show up in the >shorter time frames as well.

I think the most accurate description of the argument (whether I agree with it or not) is that in the short-term any market inefficiencies are so small that they are swamped by trading costs. Those small inefficiencies though are aggregated over longer time-frames and become much more exploitable (especially as this is a non-linear process) relative to costs.

All the above is just me "thinking aloud" rather than claiming to have an answer. It's probably not what you want in your comments section anyway (!) but is a very interesting topic.